The new TV is in place now and I've got the audio working, mostly.

A complex system that works in invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

—J. Gall

Our new television was delivered on Saturday. It fills the cabinet, just like we planned.[1]

[Photo]

Old TV


[Photo]

New TV


It took us a little while to get used to the new look and feel. It's not a flat screen, so there's a fair bit of glare. (Ignore, for example, the reflection of the photographer in the big TV image.) And the colors looked a little...off at first, but we concluded eventually that we just needed to get used to a bigger screen.

[Image]

Once the new TV was in place, it was time to investigate how to hookup the audio. My first thought was to simply run each of the audio sources into the amplifier and ignore the volume on the television. However, the amplifier is missing a very handy function: mute. So my second strategy is the one you see on the right. I run audio from the cable box into the TV and run audio out from the TV through the amplifier.

I've got two problems (and I welcome input if you've wrestled through them already!). First, mute on the television doesn't actually mute the audio out from the TV. Who's dumb idea was that!?

Second, the TV claims the sound is “mono” when it comes from the cable box. Maybe I've got a bad connection or a bad cable, but if not, I'm very confused.

[1]On an interesting, but unrelated, note, this photo does a nice job of illustrating the difference in “color temperature” between incandescent bulbs and daylight. The small TV picture is mostly illuminated with lamps, the large TV picture is mostl illuminated with natural light. I should probably have fiddled with the white balance or something.

There are no comments on this essay.
Add a comment or subscribe to (existing and future) comments on this essay.
Name:
Email*:
 *Please provide your real email address; it will not be displayed as part of the comment.
Homepage:
Comment**:
 **The following markup may be used in the body of the comment: a, abbr, b, br, code, em, i, p, pre, strong, and var. You can also use character entities. Any other markup will be discarded, including all attributes (except href on a). Your tag soup will be sanitized...